Cullen Landis

This short traces the history of sound in the movies, beginning with French scientist Leon Scott's experiments in 1857. Featured are snippets from early sound pictures.

Just before the scheduled electrocution of stockbroker Kenneth Avery for the murder of Mazie Lawrence, Nan Perry makes one last plea to the governor for a stay of execution and relates the incidents that led to Mazie's death. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Vacationing in the Canadian Northwest, a playwright and a songwriter both fall in love with Marie Cleste and take her back with them to New York when her father and her sweetheart apparently die in a forest fire. (The father did perish; the sweetheart escaped, crippled, with his blinded Indian guide into the forest to hide his infirmities.)

Eddie is conned into fronting a speakeasy for a local gangster who intends to frame him for the murder of a cop.

Pertio, an Argentine dancer, has a severely scarred face that has kept him from succeeding in his chosen career. He is persuaded by Caricia, an Argentine dancer who has become a star, to have a plastic surgeon repair his face. The surgery is successful and the two dancers team up both professionally and personally. However, the doctor who performed the operation has fallen madly in love with Caricia, and his determination to have her leads him to perform a procedure on Pertio that makes his scars reappear.

This is a farce, concerning itself with a young husband and a wife who are becoming stranged over money matters. A stenographer, Vera, overheats her bosses’ client say she cannot stay in Reno the necessary three months to get a divorce, offering $1,000 to the one who will impersonate her there. Vera takes the job - but the woman’s husband, not knowing, also comes...

The Devil's Skipper was based on Demetrios Contos, a seafaring yarn by Jack London. Effectively cast against type, Belle Bennett plays a wronged woman who becomes the most brutal and feared slave-ship captain on the Seven Seas.

A two-reel version of 1925's Pampered Youth. Included on Criterion's Blu-ray release of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons.

Part of a 7-part series exploring all aspects of Hollywood.

The second of Thomas Meighan's three 1927 vehicles, We're All Gamblers was also the first of two collaborations between Meighan and director James Cruze. Based on Lucky Sam McCarver, a play by Sidney Howard, the story concerns a refugee of the Lower East Side who rises to the uppermost rungs of the nightclub world, all for the sake of a "dame." Boxer Sam McCarver (Meighan) falls in love with society girl Carlotta Asche (Mariette Mische).